I have just experienced three transformational days at the first Asia Pacific Coaching Conference held in Singapore, and before I share my learning’s and take-aways I wanted to publicly acknowledge Foo See Luan and Nancy Hughes Verhoeven and their team of dedicated individuals for bringing together 300 coaches from across the region to talk, listen, learn and collaborate.

The theme of the conference was ‘Coaching for Sustainable Mulitcultural Communities’ and the attendees were certainly diverse; I met fellow coaches from Japan, Korea, Taiwan, China, Australia, India, Brazil, USA, Norway and of course Singapore.

Coach Denise Wright and team facilitated a World Cafe on the conference theme. I am a fan of facilitated processes such as World Cafe and enjoyed the dialogue around, whether coaches themselves are a community that can model multi-culturalism? And what an opportunity we have to influence the leaders we coach by encouraging listening without judgment. One concept that was floated was that we are a ‘Coaching Nation’ in as much that we are united in our passion to facilitate positive change.

I witnessed coaches preparing for their credentialing with the International Coach Federation, which represents coaches to the rest of the world in terms of their ethics and competency and I saw new and experienced coaches eager to learn methodologies and approaches to  better serve their clients.

Presentations that I attended included; the Neuroscience of Coaching and how the brain resists change and yet can learn new strategies very quickly when coached to do so, how to assess Cultural Intelligence and plan a coaching approach to better equip executives to work effectively and how coaching and coaches are developing based on research of the profession.

A keynote from my fellow Certified Speaking Professional, Marcia Reynolds invited the audience to consider first looking for similarities in people rather than difference. Marcia shared strategies on how to do this which I personally found particularly useful.

Omar Khan, who I have had the privilege of meeting before, gave a powerful presentation on the importance of effective communication from his own multicultural background and his early influences including, Neuro Linguistic Programming and the mind of Dr. Scott M. Peck. The proceedings were kept moving smoothly by Rob Salisbury, CSP with his excellent MC skills allowing speakers and participants alike to enjoy themselves.

Over and above the presentations were the informal conversations I had with old and new friends in the hallways. If you were in Singapore and attended the conference you will know how important such an event is for the coaching profession in this region, if you were not then be sure not to miss the next one. And if you want to  get a view of what the conference was like then it was captured by professional photographer Zurina Bryant (yes, my wife) who will be posting pictures on her website.

If you attended do let me know your experiences.

NLP is a model of how humans think, feel, behave and communicate. When NLP was developed in the 1970′s by Bandler and Grinder it was a radical departure from the field of psychology, which at the time was focused more on human dysfunction than peak performance.

Today, with the acceptance of positive psychology, NLP appears less radical can be viewed as an excellent framework for learning to communicate effectively, to model people and systems and to design strategies for peak performance. Learning NLP can improve the performance of athletes, sales people, business people, coaches, trainers, teachers, therapists and parents.

NLP for Consulting, Training and Coaching

I use NLP and NeuroSemantics in my consulting, training and coaching and I enjoy sharing the technology through public programs that I hold in Singapore and other parts of SE Asia. You can get a list of the upcoming programs by clicking here. I highly recommend NLP Communication and  Coaching Essentials which is the first 3-day of a NLP Practitioner program and covers how to communicate and coach effectively plus we are conducting  a full NLP Master Practitioner training in October.

NLP  Association of Singapore Video

If you like watching videos on YouTube then you can watch part of my presentation to the Singapore NLP Association.

Since the 1970s, futurists have been telling us that the world is changing, that the change itself is changing, and that the changing change is also accelerating.  And much of this change is how the world is getting smaller.  When I first read Alvin Tofler in the 1970s (Future Shock), it seemed like science fiction, but no longer.  The predictions that life on this planet would one day be like a village, a global village—that day seems to have arrived.  Thomas L. Friedman calls this “the flattening of the world” in The World is Flat (2005).  In that book he identifies ten “flatteners” beginning with the fall of the Berlin Wall to the introduction of Windows to open-sourcing, outsourcing, offshoring, insourcing, and so on.

The world is not only smaller, it is faster.  News today occurs on thousands of cable and internet channels—24/7 / 360 days of the year.  News today travels around the world not merely in hours or even minutes, but in seconds.  In moments, information about political crisis, armed invasions, tsunamias, earthquakes, Britany Spears, the price of oil, a suicide bomb explosion, etc. can be in our email inboxes and on hundreds of news programs.  So today we have the “soft” science of economics is governed by other “soft” sciences (psychology, linguistics, wealth, etc.) that is now influenced and affected by more and more variables.  And that means the world is becoming more and more systemic.

As a soft science, economics is influenced as much by beliefs, frames-of-mind, representations, interpretations, emotions, values, states and meta-states as it is by anything tangible like houses or mortgages.  What is the value of a house?  Above and beyond the materials that go into the construction and its cost, the supply of houses, the demand for them, the value depends on what people think, how much they want them, how much sellers think they can ask for, etc.  It depends on fallible human states and meta-states.  That’s why they can be so over-valued that they can mess up the economy.

Similarly with the human decision to lend money to a buyer for a mortgage.  It depends on the criteria they set for determining who they can trust to be dependable in repaying the loan.  And once a mortgage company creates a subprime loan for people with no or little down payment, who don’t have the financial resources, but who believe that the value of the house will increase at such a rate that it will have, say $100,000 equity in 12 months, and then someone sells these high return loans to Wall Street who then offers them on a world market … then people can believe and feel confident about returns, and borrow more money on the assumed value of the increased and increasing equity and somewhere along the line we all move to La-La land assuming that if we believe it or think it, it will happen.

Then reality hits.  The balloon payment on the loan comes due and people begin to default on their loans.  This lowers the confident feelings of others about the loans, which is communicated by the sensational bad-news “News” organizations thereby creating more fear and worry about the home mortgage market, then a negative spiral begins and suddenly market value drops around the world.  And the nature of the world— smaller, faster, and more systemic is amplifying all of this.

There’s now one more quality.  It is more psychological. Did you notice the number of states and meta-states in these descriptions?  How many did you notice?  We call all of this economics, yet it is actually psycho-economics. The psycho- part is the role of people’s assumptions and interpretations of value or dis-value, their emotional states of confidence or fear, of optimism or apprehensiveness and how these states play such a critical role in economics.

Apparently the banking industry has lost a trillion dollars worth of value and the US Congress has voted to spend more than a trillion dollars to deal with it.  A trillion dollars!  How much is that?  On one program someone said that if you had a trillion dollars in one dollar bills, it would be 67.8 miles tall (over 100 kilometers).  Or if you went out on a spending spree — and you could spend a million dollars a day (a million!!) — and you started today, it would take you more than 2,000 years to spend it.

Okay, so if the economy or the banks lost a trillion dollars, where did all of that money go?  Who got it?  The weird thing is that much of it didn’t go anywhere.  Much of it existed on paper as a record of the way people were thinking, expecting, valuing, feeling confident or worried, etc.  One day people made certain evaluations about their trust and confidence in certain homes, businesses, markets, and futures and presto— there was a trillion dollars of value.  At a later time, they lost confidence—and a trillion dollars of value disappeared.

What is this downturn about?  Perhaps it is just a market correction, perhaps it is another aspect of the flattening of the world, perhaps it is a call to recognize the role of our meta-states in creating our social realities.  Whatever it is, it is a call to your resilience, state management, and ability to know that your highest asset is your ability to add value.

I think it is also a call for a belief in responsible abundance.  That is, if our psycho-economics play such a crucial role in all of this, we now have to resist the temptation to play into the hands of the negative press.  It is the psychology of the press to sensationalize whatever they can and turn facts into negative catastrophes.  After all, if in the small, fast, systemic, and psychological world—our beliefs, fears, worries, hopes, optimism, resilience (and many other states and meta-states) are now key factors determining whether we set in motion a negative downward spiraling or an upward positive spiraling —then we have to be more responsible to fear-mongering, fear-spreading, negative-forecasting and more committed to intelligent optimism that fosters resilience, persistence, and hope.

What’s needed is an army of people committed to actualizing their own potentials and those of others.  What’s needed is a community of people who believe in an abundance of possibilities and potentials—if people are given a chance.  What’s needed are a global village of people who will resist the negatively-oriented media and do their part to unleash more and more possibilities.

“We live in an age of unprecedented opportunity: if you’ve got ambition and smarts, you can rise to the top of your chosen profession, regardless of where you started out. But with opportunity comes responsibility. Companies today aren’t managing their employees’ careers; knowledge workers must, effectively, be their own chief executive officers. It’s up to you to carve out your place, to know when to change course, and to keep yourself engaged and productive during a work life that may span some 50 years.”  –

Self Development is intrinsic to self-leadership as leadership and learning are inseparable. So as Drucker says, we must take responsibility for our own growth and success – we must be the CEO of our own mind and body.

Self Development includes, developing healthy self esteem, self knowledge, self image, self belief and self confidence so that you can develop your unique talents and abilities and contribute.

Through Self development and self leadership we can find meaning and significance in our lives, attain states of self efficacy (Bandura), flow (Csikszentmihalyi) and self actualisation (Maslow).

• Self-efficacy is the belief that you are capable of performing in a certain way to attain your goals It is the belief that you have the capabilities to execute the courses of actions required to manage prospective situations. Self-efficacy is the opposite of helplessness (Seligman) it means you are the captain of your ship and you can set a course and navigate obstacles to reach your desired destination and win the prize.
• Flow is that mental state in which you are fully immersed in what you are doing doing; you experience  feelings of energized focus, full involvement, and success in the process of the activity. You experience flow states when you challenge your abilities with an appropriate task, so that time goes away and you are fully in the moment. Surprisingly we find we are happiest when we are full engaged by work rather that slacking off and resting.
• Self actualisation is the desire to become everything that you arecapable of becoming and to find meaning in what you do. Self actualisation is the big “Why” question, it answers why you are here and why you are doing what you do.

Some organisations view self development in human capital but in the current financial climate it is more likely that your self development is up to you.

What are you doing about your self development?

• Are you regularly reading books or blogs that enrich your mind?
• Are you associating with people that challenge your thinking?
• Are you attending seminars or webinars that expand your perspective?
• Are you spending time in quiet reflection and evaluating what’s important to you and your community?

At Self Leadership International we include self development and positive psychology in all our programmes, in addition we teach certification programmes in Neurolinguistic Programming (NLP), NeuroSemantics and Coaching.

• NLP is essentially a model of learning and demonstrates that we can model human thinking, behaviour and communication.
• Neuro-Semantics is about translating great ideas into reality, about performing our highest meanings, about enriching our performances with the most compelling intentions, and getting to the heart of things via communication.
• Coaching is unlocking a person’s potential to maximise their own performance. It is helping them to learn rather than teaching them. Clients say that coaching brings out their best by helping them focus, break down tasks and clarify their values.

Through these technologies you can learn to lead your mind and body to create the results you want in your life.

To your highest and best!

Communication

Good communication skills are essential to lead yourself and influence others. Poor communication causes pain, conflict, loss of productivity and profit.

Listen to a  podcast on Communication Skills.

To win the communication game you must know and apply the rules of the game; and the #1 rule of communication is that -  All communication occurs inside a frame.

A communication frame gives the listener reference points to know how to handle the information they hear from you. A communication frame points the listener’s mind in a particular direction and when used correctly will create trust and remove misunderstandings.

Any time we say “In terms of …” we set the boundaries of the discussion and hence the frame. Often two or more people in conflict are actually discussing different topics or perspectives, using “in terms of…” allows us to focus on the specific topic or to challenge people who have gone off topic.

For example:

• “In terms of reaching a decision in the next hour, let me make this point…”
• “In terms of us working together in this team, how would you like me to interpret your behaviour?”
• “In terms of our stated budget, do you think this is a wise purchase?”

Here are some other simple examples of communication frames and how to use them:

The Workshop Frame:
“Just work shopping – what if we did…x”. This frame is great for putting ideas out; it reduces reactions because it sets the frame that it is ok for the other person to give input.

The Sharing Frame:
“I’m just sharing, this is the way I feel about… x”. This frame allows you to share your feelings without the other person needing to take your emotional state personally.

The ‘What if’ Frame:
“I know we have never done this before, but what if we did?” This is a great frame for setting for pushing the boundaries and creative thinking.

There are, of course, frames that you already use and many more you could learn to use. The frames we use in language often reflect our frames of mind, do you have a ‘can do’ frame’? Or do you operate from a ‘can’t do’ frame?

Training yourself to become aware of your frames of mind and frames of speech is a fundamental of self-leadership and using the technology of Neuro Semantics (an evolution of NLP) we can set frames for great relationships, health and even wealth.

Want to know more? For Communication Skills Workshops in Singapore, Australia, Malaysia, India or the Middle East  contact us.

Many training and change initiatives including coaching are a waste of time and money because they don’t deliver results. Organisations tend to measure people in terms of performance and potential and so any investment in people should show results in either or both of these.

In Singapore,  Self Leadership International transforms people’s performance and potential by impacting how they think and how they feel about what they do and by assisting the organisation to create a culture that will support the behaviours required for success.

There are many approaches to  ‘leadership development.’ but what makes the difference is the methodology.

Self Leadership International’s consulting, training and coaching utilises a Neuro Semantic approach.  Neuro Semantics is the science of how our behaviours (actions and communication) are driven by how we feel (Neurology) and what something means to us (Semantics).

People do what they do (Neurology) because they believe (Semantics) it is the right thing to do as judged by their personal values, corporate or ethnic culture.

For leadership development to be effective it is necessary to change or create new behaviours and develop potential; it is therefore essential  to consider what meanings the individual or team has about their behaviour/performance, how they feel when performing and what cultural influences support or inhibit performance and potential. Only when these issues are understood can we consider how to encourage mindsets and develop leadership skills.

An example might be that a business wants to encourage its managers to coach their staff to develop the potential. The skills of coaching such as; rapport, listening, asking questions, creating awareness  and co-creating outcomes and action plans can be taught; but will the managers apply these skills if they don’t believe that they have the time to coach, don’t feel confident to coach and don’t get acknowledged for coaching? What if the managers have a mindset that developing people is not as important as delivering business results or believe that if they develop their people their own job is in jeopardy?

With a Neuro Semantic approach Self Leadership International can survey the hidden forces of culture within an organisation, we can assess the meanings held by individuals or groups in terms of values, beliefs and identity and we can design programs that actualise performance and potential.

Measuring performance requires establishing behavioural benchmarks for each area that you wish to measure. A benchmark takes competency, such as ‘must communicate effectively’ or ‘builds appropriate trust’ and makes it tangible by creating a scale of observable (see, hear, feel) actions.

Self Leadership International has created a number of benchmarks for key leadership competencies; however there is massive value in each organisation going through the process of creating its own benchmarks as this creates buy-in for a new culture.

Whilst based in Singapore, Self Leadership International works throughout the Asia Pacific Region.

(Copyright Self Leadership International – no reproduction without permission, thanks)

You have! Wow that’s good I thought it was just me

To make error is human, we all screw up or we are not living.

As I write this blog I can still feel the fresh emotion of embarrasment from a recent mistake. Yesterday  I posted on a forum and had not framed my communication in line with my intention. The result was that I was publically attacked for what was perceived as a ‘superior and glib’ attitude.

When we are attacked our first reactions are to fight or run but with self leadership we can choose our response and learn from a situation.

My self leadership which creates self-awareness, caught my first thought of vengeance for the attack, and asked the question, “is this useful?”

My immediate second thought was, “how can I hide this mistake?” and again my self leadership asked the question, “is this useful?”

Once my reactivity has settled I was able to assess the situation.

• Could my post be perceived in the way my attacker said? – yes, I can now how see how it could.
• Have I made a mis-take? – yes.
• Am I perfect? – no, I am human.
• Can I learn from this – yes, this is valuable feedback, perhaps I do have the potential for a superior attitude and this is not in line with my highest intention. This is something to work on.
• What is the best response? – Aplogise, explain my intention but make no excuses, change my behaviour.

By sharing my thought process I hope I have illustrated a method to handle mis-takes.

1. Don’t react
2. Accept that you are human and not perfect
3. Aplogise and make amends
4. Learn from the experience

It has often been said that, “If we are not making mistakes, we are not doing anything worthwhile.” I would agree with this sentiment as I think we learn more from our mistakes than our successes; unfortunately we live in cultures that are often intolerant to mistakes and these are cultures that don’t learn.

Perhaps it is true that without the self leadership to handle mistakes we will never be happy and without the courage to make mistakes we will never have leaders.

(copyright Andrew Bryant, no reproduction without permission – thank you)

I was asked to comment on the statement, “NLP is dangerous as it pigeon holes people and their behaviour.” The author of the statement feels as NLP is based on models and assumptions and a certain set of conditions then the user of that model cannot understand its limitations and the assumptions made.

It is a truism that people fear what they don’t understand and the statement show little or no knowledge of Neurolinguistic Programming or NLP for short.

NLP is Language

NLP evolved as a model of language. The conditions of that modeling were the observation of effective therapists such as Virginia Satir, Fritz Perls and Milton Erickson. These therapists were able to create transformations in the thinking, feeling and behaviours of their patients through just conversation. Richard Bandler (a student of computer science) and John Grinder ( a linguistics professor) were curious about how changing language creates change and came to the conclusion that language is the software of the mind.

The first model of NLP is the Meta Model, which is a series of challenging questions to ill-formed sentences. For example, if someone says, “She makes me angry!” we can ask, “Who is she?” “What is it that she does that causes you to choose to feel angry?” “Does this always happen?” “What if it didn’t always happen?” “What might you choose to do instead?”

Through the use of the Meta Model we are able to bring awareness to the individual about how they have re-presented reality and then languaged that representation. This last sentence highlights a principle of NLP that pre-dates its founders and goes back to Alfred Korzybski , who said “The map is not the territory.” More simply put we respond not to reality (the physical world) but to our mental map of reality or how we perceive the physical world. This is demonstrated when you interview two or more witnesses to an event such as a car crash, each witness represents the event through their own perception and creates their own representation of the event.

Building on this principle the founders of NLP discovered that different people had different preferences as to how they pay attention to the physical world. Some people pay more attention to visual information, some to auditory information, some to Kinethetic (sensation) information and some people emphasise their thinking about the information and so respond only rationally or logically (Auditory Digital response).

NLP builds rapport and communication

This information is useful in building rapport and increasing communication effectiveness. If someone prefers visual information and you spend your time telling them about your idea, you will be less effective than if you show them some pictures or charts.
How we filter and then respond to information is known as a Meta Program. The representational Meta Program I have just described is the first of sixty such cognitive filters that advanced students of NLP and its newest development, Neuro Semantics, have available to understand how people operate.

It has been my experience that when people are first introduced to NLP and the representation system, they may over generalise and make pidgeon holing statements such as, “oh he is a kinesthetic so that’s why he behaves like that.” I can fully appreciate how such a statement might lead to some incredulity on the validity of NLP, but to label NLP ineffective base on such a novice expression is akin to labelling Einstein Theory of relativity invalid on a high school student’s inability to explain a physics experiment.

In my last paragraph I just demonstrated two techniques of NLP, pacing and metaphor. Pacing is used to establish rapport by agreeing with some element of a person’s representation of the world and metaphor is used carry over meaning from one context to another to create a new meaning.

So is NLP dangerous and does it pidgeon hole people?

“Dangerous to who and how? ”

NLP is a Model

NLP is a model of human thinking and communication; it is based on several principles that include: the map is not the territory, people are not broken – they work perfectly well (according to their maps) and that behind every behaviour is a positive intention.
Is it dangerous to want to understand how people are representing their reality, to acknowledge that they are not broken and therefore have the resources to see the world anew, or to want to understand intention so that behaviours create the result required?

I don’t think so.

Can NLP be misused and misrepresented by novices or by those bent on doing evil? Then the answer is yes. This is also true of money and power which can be forces for good and evil.  My personal belief is that ignorance breeds evil, ignorance of the outcome of our behaviours. In NLP we have a safeguard for such ignorance; it is known as the ecology frame. The ecology frame asks the question, “will this thought/action be useful, safe and beneficial for self and others, in the short and long term?”

What if our politicians were to ask such ecology questions? Now then the world would be a safer place

If you want to learn NLP visit out website and learn how to become an NLP Master Practitioner.

NLP allows you to do jut this because NLP (Neuro linguistic program) is an instruction manual on how to run your own brain. It also allows us to communicate effectively with others even if they have a different software configuration.‘Neuro’ refers to our mind-body system and recognises that communication is so much more than words. When we give or receive information our neurology and our physiology is affected. We re-present reality on the screen of our mind.

‘Linguistic’ refers to the way that words create meanings when they are used to communicate. Humans are meaning making machines and are eager to make ‘sense’ of any communication. In the urgency to make meanings from events or communication, dis-empowering conclusions are often drawn.

‘Programming’ infers that we can take control of this process and run it more effectively, just like computer software. With NLP, if something is not working for you it is possible to re-program your neurology and physiology to behave in a different and more empowering way.

The term Neuro Linguistic has been around since the 1930′s but in the late 1960′s and early 70′s Richard Bandler and John Grinder modeled some the language patterns of three effective therapists (Satir, Perls and Erickson) and coined the term Neurolinguistic Programming or NLP for short.

NLP is essentially a model of learning and demonstrates that we can model human thinking, behaviour and communication.

Initially the Neuro Linguisitic Programming model was used in therapy, but today NLP has many applications:

* NLP for business
* NLP for sales
* NLP for coaching
* NLP for communication
* NLP for training and education
* NLP for personal development

NLP takes a very different attitude from some of the old psychologies. In NLP, we do not start from the assumption that people are broken and need to be fixed; instead, in NLP, we assume the opposite – that people work perfectly well, that they have all the resources that they need, and that the only problem isn’t with them, but with their programming which can be changed (updated).

NeuroSemantics is a new model of NLP that emerged in 1995, but more about this in another post.

(This blog is copyright Andrew Bryant. Unauthorized duplication prohibited. Use Only with Permission. Thank you.)

This program will equip you with the ability run your own brain, change mindsets and influence with integrity.

For full details of  our NLP Master Practitioner in  and Neuro Semantic Master Practitioner  in  Singapore 2009 visit:
http://www.selfleadership.com/NLP_master-practitioner.htm